Tag: language

Today I want to talk about a few words that are curiously similar between English and Chinese, and one word that is just curious.

In English, we tend to call people who are active late into the night, night owls. In parts of China, (small) owls are called 夜猫子 yèmaōzi, literally “night catty”. (I don’t know which parts of China would that be, but I guess it’s northern China.) More often, it’s figuratively used to refer to people who stay up late – the same as English night owls. The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary also offers another word for late sleepers: 夜游神, literally “nigh-roaming god”, refers people who wander at night.

Also in English, you might know people who program as “code monkeys”, invoking the image of a million monkeys banging on the keyboard. (Wiktionary editor Equinox notes this word is “slang, sometimes derogatory”. Of course, it can also be used self-deprecatingly.) Chinese has the perfect translation for this phrase: 程序猿 chéngxùyúan, pronounced exactly the same as 程序员 chéngxùyúan “programmer”. However, instead of using the character 员, that marks a person’s occupation or membership, as in 驾驶员 driver, 服务员 server or 演员 actor, instead the character for apes, 猿, is used, making it “programmape”. (Well, humans are apes…)

Sometimes typos also make new words: one jocular name for engineers is 攻城狮 gōngchéngshī “fortress-attacking lion” or “siege lion”, again having the exact pronunciation as 工程师 gōngchéngshī “engineer”. The story is like this: Tencent is the company that developed the hugely popular IM program QQ (800 million users) and WeChat (300 million users – about the total population of United States) among other services. One of its microblog accounts posted that one of its security guards managed to go through rounds of interviews, and became an engineer at its research institute. A rare event in itself, and a notable accomplishment indeed. But instead of 工程师, the post coined the word 攻城狮, or siege lion. And the rest is Internet history.